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The Nerd as Auteur in BioShock Infinite

The game BioShock Infinite brings players to the floating city of Columbia during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.Credit
Irrational Games

QUINCY, MASS. — The office here that houses Irrational Games isn’t listed on a building directory. The company door is unmarked and locked. And the maze of rooms that many people would want to see behind that door — the studio where one of the year’s most anticipated video games is being readied for release on Tuesday — is harder to find.

Ken Levine, the 46-year-old co-founder and creative director of Irrational Games, likes it that way. “We need our privacy,” he said recently, “to give BioShock Infinite the care it deserves.”

The word “care,” however, doesn’t come close to capturing the effort that went into BioShock Infinite, an unusually cinematic shooting adventure set in a floating city in which the ultimate goal is to rescue a mysterious young woman. Mr. Levine and a team of 200 have been toiling on the game, the third BioShock installment, for more than four years.

The estimated cost of the project is upward of $100 million, not including marketing expenses, which could add another $100 million, analysts said. That is considered a large budget even among blockbuster franchises like Grand Theft Auto, Halo and Call of Duty.

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Ken Levine brought his interest in pop culture and American history to BioShock Infinite.

Mr. Levine said he hoped that his audience would see brilliance in the new version. In an age of inexpensive smartphone games, he noted, “it’s getting harder to ask someone to spend $60 on something that’s merely a good effort.” It has to be “different and really special,” he added.

A small number of recent games have combined muscular narratives with stunningly engaging play: Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noire, both from Rockstar Games, a leader in storytelling; Portal 2; Heavy Rain; and Batman: Arkham City. But many consider Mr. Levine’s invention to be the most ambitious when it comes to groundbreaking conceptualization.

BioShock Infinite is packed with cultural references both high and low. Mr. Levine’s research included the book “The Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson; the Occupy Wall Street movement; a short, silent film of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake; Hitchcock; the Beach Boys; Freud; Disneyland; and on and on. What he has created with these disparate elements could be called a literary endeavor for a multimedia age.

“Anticipation among press and fans has reached a fever pitch,” Kyle Orland, the senior gaming editor at the Ars Technica blog, said in an e-mail. This is Mr. Levine’s chance, he added, “to really cement BioShock as a serious franchise and a tent-pole for the industry to look to every few years.”

So far people have embraced the series. Fans tattoo themselves with Little Sisters, and Big Daddies, the creepy, skulking enemies in BioShock, the narrative-rich horror game that started this series in 2007 with a fictional plane crash and murderous adventures in an underwater city called Rapture. The original version has sold more than five million copies since its release for computers and game consoles.

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BioShock Infinite includes characters like the mysterious Elizabeth and the prophet Comstock.

The filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro is a longtime admirer, and some aficionados have been known to dress up as the game’s characters. A young woman from Moscow did such a meticulous job of transforming herself to look like Elizabeth — the saucer-eyed, magic-wielding protagonist in the installment coming out this week — that Irrational Games hired her as “the official face of Elizabeth” for marketing.

BioShock Infinite is set in a steampunk-meets-Beaux-Arts city called Columbia, which flies above Earth amid puffy clouds and azure skies. In Mr. Levine’s story line Columbia was part of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Passing through the town, the player witnesses quizzical, beautiful moments, as when a barbershop quartet sings the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” But Columbia seems grounded by people with real problems and emotions.

The city is recognizable on a human level because, for better or worse, Mr. Levine is not like other artists making video games. Yes, he describes himself as a nerd, someone who collects action figures and comic book art. But he professes to care more about popular culture and American history than he does about playing, say, the latest version of a military shooter game like Call of Duty.

History and theory, specifically the idea of American exceptionalism, inspired BioShock Infinite. Based upon a preview in which the first three hours of the game were playable, it was clear that the game would be as much about politics, race, religion and romance as about killing enemies. Not that the enemies aren’t compelling in a thoughtful mash-up kind of way. The Motorized Patriot character is a trippy George Washington robot with a cracked, porcelain-doll face and armed with a Gatling-like gun.

“No matter how much amazing cultural content Levine and Irrational Games manage to include in their work they have always made sure that the interactive game aspect of BioShock titles is polished and accessible,” Kyle A. Moody, who teaches a video-game-journalism course at the University of Iowa, said in an e-mail. “Whether it’s technology, interface, storytelling, themes or all of these things, BioShock games mean a move to the future through the lens of the past.”

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The animators Ian Davis and Jon Mangagil, from left, at the Irrational Games studio in Quincy, Mass.

It may be that Mr. Levine drove his team to work so hard on the BioShock series because he failed in other endeavors before entering the world of games, including a stint as a computer consultant. Growing up as a nerd with a lisp in Upper Saddle River, N.J., he recalled “very intensely being bullied and being an outsider and having nobody.”

“I’d look around the playground and have nobody to be with or talk to,” he said. “To some degree I’m still sort of like that.” He hides it well. He comes across as outwardly affable, communicative and sagelike — with no trace of a lisp.

As he became more social, studying drama and literature at Vassar, Mr. Levine gravitated toward writing. The playwright Jon Robin Baitz introduced him to an agent, who helped him get a screenwriting job for a romantic comedy movie, “Devil’s Advocate,” that was to star the Christian pop singer Amy Grant but was never made. After he moved to Los Angeles, however, his movie dreams were quickly dashed.

“When you’re a screenwriter and you need money and you have that desperation on you, oh, they smell it,” he said. “They smell it the minute you walk into the room.”

In 1995, after answering an employment ad in a video game magazine, Mr. Levine found himself at Looking Glass Studios, a Boston-based maker of credible games like System Shock 2 that never became huge sellers. “At 29,” he said, “I was one of the oldest people at the studio.” There he worked with a younger mentor, Doug Church, and with the noted game designer Warren Spector.

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A character called the Motorized Patriot.Credit
Irrational Games

“Working with Ken was a never-ending game of ‘Where did that come from?’ ” Mr. Spector said. “His imagination just took him places most people — even most creative people — couldn’t or wouldn’t go.”

Mr. Levine and two colleagues eventually left Looking Glass and founded Irrational Games in his living room. After some false starts and two good games he began to make BioShock for Take-Two Interactive (which purchased Irrational in 2006). While Stephen King-like horror and Ayn Rand-ian philosophy lurked around every turn, “BioShock One was the Robinson Crusoe story,” Mr. Levine said. “A guy in a plane crash ends up in a mysterious place and has to fend for himself to get out.”

For many critics it was the best game of 2007, averaging a 96 rating out of 100 on Metacritic, the review aggregation site. BioShock 2, which was made by another studio, was considered neither a debacle nor an artistic achievement.

BioShock Infinite is much more intricate, so much so that bloggers have struggled to define it. But Mr. Levine concocted an elevator pitch, comparing it to the original version: “This guy owes money and has to go to this fantastical flying city in an alternate 1912 and find this girl with these earth-shattering powers. But both are really old stories, classic stories: the shipwreck and the rescue mission. And that’s good. That serves as an entree people can dig their teeth into.”

Like the first BioShock the new version is meant to grab the player from the start. So the world of Columbia and its inhabitants initially come at you like a thrilling amusement park ride. “I think my first memory on earth was at the World’s Fair” in Montreal, Mr. Levine said. “And the first memory I have is being on a ride.”

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Mr. Levine led a team of 200 in developing the new game.

During the first hours of the game, which takes 16 hours to complete, one can feel his appreciation for Disney’s Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean rides. Those animatronic masterpieces were like games “because they were semi-interactive in the sense that you had control over where you looked,” Mr. Levine said. “And your experience might be different from that of the person sitting next to you.”

Moving along as the former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt, the player is bombarded by the city’s chaotic sights and sounds. Yet he manages to save Elizabeth from a dark tower amid the vastness of Columbia by grabbing a hook and traversing the Skyline, an invention that seems to merge the utilitarianism of a Disney monorail and the bumpy delights of the Coney Island Cyclone.

Mr. Levine said he hopes that players embrace the game’s blend of religion, politics and cult of personality. Zachary Hale Comstock, a white-bearded, nativist prophet who rules over Columbia, is portrayed either as comforting or frightening by two warring factions, the xenophobic Founders and the anarchist Vox Populi. As complex as the game already is, Mr. Levine said that “10,000 things,” like online multiplayer options, were left on the cutting-room floor.

At the end of a day at the studio Mr. Levine contemplated a second act in life. He estimated that he was owed over 130 unused vacation days and said that because of his workaholic ways his wife at one point thought he would have a heart attack. Now, he said, leaning back on a rolling office chair, he looks forward to “a palate-cleansing vacation.”

The future may mean writing a screenplay for a BioShock film. It may mean leaving games completely. Or not.

“That’s what the vacation is for,” Mr. Levine said. “Some people realize their ambition and then think, ‘What’s next in my life?’ ”